


Absence

by britomart_is



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Horror, Community: sharp_teeth, Gen, Halloween, Hallucinations, Horror, Hurt Dean Winchester, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt Sam Winchester, Nightmare Fuel, Sensory Deprivation, Worried Dean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-24
Updated: 2016-10-24
Packaged: 2018-08-24 08:56:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8366134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/britomart_is/pseuds/britomart_is
Summary: Sam's sense of taste goes first.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the sharp_teeth horror comment meme, reposted for Halloween 2016.

It says something important about Sam's life that it takes him so long to notice. 

The first time (he thinks it was the first time, but how can he be sure?) is after a reanimated serial child molester crawls out of the unmarked grave that vigilante justice planted him in and proceeds to slam Sam's face into the ground until Dean ends it with the drop of a match. The spirit burns up even quicker than the bones do, weight lifting from Sam's back in an instant. 

Sam heaves himself to his feet and spits a mouthful of blood onto the ground. He prods gently at his gums with his tongue, checking for missing teeth (Sam happily acknowledges the utility of good looks in this line of work, and has neither the time nor the funds for cosmetic dentistry, so he excuses his vanity if he's a little paranoid when things start fucking up his face.)

The next day his mouth is still tender and sore where his teeth cut into sensitive flesh, so it hurts too much to eat, anyway. The lingering earthy tinge of blood is hardly remarkable, given the circumstances. 

Three weeks later, and Dean's looking at him funny when Sam pushes his plate away abruptly, stoneware skittering over the formica table, club sandwich lopsided with only a bite taken out of it. 

"Dude, what's going on with you?" 

Sam's dropped a few pounds lately, but it's not like he's starving himself to fit into his prom dress. "I need to go wash my hands."

It's just been busy, is all. It's barely three hours since they torched a corpse that was—if not _fresh_ , still new enough to be messy with withered flesh and fat and embalmed organs that _smell_ when you burn them. Now Dean, Dean of the cast-iron stomach, he might have no problem chowing down on a sloppy joe before the smell of smoke's even faded from his clothes. 

But Sam can't stop tasting it. 

It's just so _easy_ to explain it away. Sam bites into the crisp skin of an apple, _feels_ its sharp give under his teeth – but the flavor is heavy with the syrupy tang of rot. Sam has to double-check that the fruit in his hand isn't sagging and brown, dripping with decay. As he spits out half-chewed apple, earning a look of mild revulsion from Dean, Sam isn't sure whether to distrust his eyes or his tongue. But the simplest explanation is probably the answer, right?

Just a bad apple. 

Another week passes, and Sam's churning in bed, his stomach clawing itself in hunger. Fruits and vegetables seem to rot in his mouth, a well-done burger tastes as bloody as if it's straight out of the slaughterhouse. Dean, panicked, tried earlier to force-feed Sam water – crystal-clear in its store-bought bottle—and Sam choked and gagged, every signal telling his brain the water must've been sitting stagnant in a storm drain. 

Sam buries his face in the pillow, desperate, weak, too uncomfortable to sleep. _Just make it stop_ , he thinks. 

The next morning, Sam eyes a forkful of eggs in trepidation. His gaze flicks to Dean's concerned face, Dean who's watching him like a hawk, and with dread he shovels the scrambled eggs into his mouth. 

And tastes nothing at all. Sam smiles around the fork. 

It's disgusting, a squishy mess in his mouth with no flavor to distract him. God, it's a relief.

#

Dean keeps trying to get out of the car. "You are _off_ caffeine, man, I'm not even fucking kidding."

"Stop. _Stop_. It isn't safe."

Dean had relaxed, when Sam started eating again. Now he's looking twice as worried. "Look. You know I'm down with your spidey sense, right? But it's just a gas station." Dean gestures at the deserted station, bored clerk visible through the window, chin resting on his hand as he flips through a Hustler. 

"How can you not smell it? It _reeks_ of sulfur." Sam will do whatever he needs to do to keep Dean from getting out of this car. Knock him out, climb over him to the steering wheel and get them the fuck out of there, even if it earns him a beatdown later. 

Dean regards him warily. "Fine." They drive in silence as Dean scans the highway signs for another gas station. After the third one still sends Sam's demon radar haywire, Sam's having to think that it's the car, it's _them_. 

"Dean," he says, voice lowered. "Why are they waiting? Where are they?"

Sam should recognize the careful, reassuring look on Dean's face as he steps closer. It's the look that comes right before Dean's arms catch him in a choke-hold and the world goes black. 

The room is on fire. Sam knows it before his brain fully comes back online, before his eyes snap open. He jackknifes up in the bed, not sure how he got there, but that's not important. 

"Fire. _Fire_."

Dean's sitting at Sam's side already, hand planted in the center of Sam's chest pushing him back to the sheets. "There's no fire. You see any fire?"

Sam studies Dean's face for some clue to why Dean's being so obtuse. "Can't you smell the smoke?"

It's too much, too much. They're probably dying already, smoke inhalation, it's too much—

Dean's got Sam's face caught between his hands, trying to steady him as Sam struggles, tries to get up. "Sam. We're gonna get you help." 

The hospital overwhelms Sam with the scent of metal and sanitizer and bodies that soil themselves as they lose their last breaths. 

They have to sedate him to get him into the MRI, and even then Sam can't fully hold still, whispers, _Dean, there's something wrong here. Dean, it smells like death. Get them out. We need to save them._

When he gets Sam back to the motel, Dean holds Sam's jaw shut till Sam swallows the pills he insists he doesn't need. "There's nothing wrong with my brain," he slurs as the drugs drag him under. 

"There's always been something wrong with your brain," Dean says, his smile a dead thing, a ghost. 

No matter how many times Dean snaps off the light, it's never more than a few minutes before Sam reaches over to turn it back on. The scent of blood is too much, too heavy in the room. Unless Sam can see it with his own eyes, he can't _know_ that Dean isn't lying slaughtered in the next bed, writhing silently with his throat slit. 

The exhaustion is worse than the hunger. _Make it stop_ , Sam thinks. _Make it stop_. 

The next day, Dean's coffee explicitly does _not_ smell like burning flesh. Or anything else.

Sam couldn't be happier.

#

Sight is the quickest. Dean's eyes are bleeding, then black, then no eyes at all. Sam stares at the empty sockets, not hearing Dean's words as Dean tries to talk to him. Dean gets up in Sam's face and Sam recoils instinctively from the cavernous darkness, from the _no eyes no EYES_.

The sky burns, holes open up in the road, shadows flicker in Sam's peripheral vision. He's afraid to take a step because he never knows where his foot's really going to come down because _obviously_ there's probably not actually a bear trap beneath him but maybe there's an open sewer. 

Sam makes it two days before Dean's skin turns black and sloughs away, maggots wiggling out of the corners of his mouth, and Sam thinks _no more_. The world mercifully goes dark.

#

Sam lasts, biting his lip and twitching and covering his ears, for three weeks of disembodied humming, of fingernails tapping repetitively. Of someone who's not there knocking slowly on the motel door, stopping just long enough to let Sam relax, then starting again. Jumping out of his seat at the blare of an air raid siren.

The final straw is when Sam's been clutching the vinyl of his seat, ignoring the sputter and hiss of the Impala's engine, sounding like it's going to explode, for a good half hour before Dean pulls to the side of the highway. 

"Why are you stopping?" Sam doesn't relax his grip on the seat. He hears Dean moving around, opening the driver's-side door. He wishes he could see him for a moment, then thinks better of it.

"The fucking engine, dude. I was hoping we'd get to actual _civilization_ , but I gotta open up the hood and see what the fuck is up."

Sam's breath is punched out of him. "The engine?"

The engine hisses, a rattlesnake is rattling somewhere _very close_ , someone is laughing, and Dean's saying, "Yeah, dude," and he must be saying something else after that, 'cause he's clutching at Sam's shoulders, shaking him, but Sam can no longer hear it.

#

Nothing needs to be off about Sam's sense of touch. The world is enough.

The stickiness of doorknobs. The pounding heat of the August sun. The way the walls sweat with condensation as Sam feels his way around the room. The scars that line Dean's skin when Sam clutches at him (Jesus, were there always so many?) Sam can't distract himself from any of it, can't help but _feel_ it. 

Dean pushes him to the bed firmly, _stay there_. Sam feels his way around the room in circles three times before he accepts that Dean's gone out. 

Sam feels the vibration of the door slamming into the wall when Dean comes back. Dean slaps at his hands, and it's not enough to stop Sam from feeling wet stickiness coating Dean's midsection, feel Dean's fine trembling as he tries to hold himself together. Sam presses his fingers to Dean's neck and stays there, glued to the steady thump of his pulse, until Dean pushes him off. 

Dean has to push him again, harder, when Sam's fingers are in the way of the needle as Dean stitches himself up. Sam sits on the edge of his bed, alone on a desert island, taking it on faith that Dean hasn't passed out from blood loss. 

Dean could be crying out for help, demons could be breaking down the door. Sam doesn't know. He does know that the bedspread feels tacky with filth, with the refuse of a thousand bodies. That his own heart is fluttering uncomfortably in his chest and there's a twinge in his back where he's strained it and never even noticed. That his skin is stiff with dirt and sweat because he can't really wash himself anymore. That a spider may or may not actually be crawling up his leg, but it doesn't really seem worth investigating the tickle of it. 

"Dean," Sam says, carefully shaping his mouth around the words, trying to remember how it feels to vocalize them. "I'm sorry. I'll be back. I'm sorry, Dean. Don't freak out." 

The world is a terrible place, and no one should be condemned to feel it so keenly. Not even Sam. 

So, just as he feels Dean's blood-sticky hand roughly palming his face, quick and frantic, he stops. The hand is gone. The spider is gone. The blood is gone.

Sam floats on a sea of nothing and listens to the absence of sound lapping at the invisible shore. His heart beats.

After a few moments of respite, Sam steels himself and forces his body back to awareness, and the world that comes to him is in full color but still _wrong_.

Weak muscles that won't move the way Sam wants them to, the stale scent of bodily fluids, lights too bright and setting off fireworks and halos in Sam's vision. A rhythmic beeping, apparently sourceless. Dean's sitting in a chair by Sam's bed, staring into the middle distance, and god, Dean's all wrong too. Dean's face is aged, lined, not as it should be. Sam's senses are lying to him again. They must be.

He wouldn't. He wouldn't lose track of time that badly. He was only gone for a second. 

Sam's heart beats, hard, like everything matters again.

Dean jumps, startled, when his eyes scan over Sam and he notices Sam awake and moving around. Dean's eyes widen in disbelief and he's lunging (a little slowly, a little stiffly, like his joints ache with age and that's just _wrong_ ) for Sam when Sam shuts it all back off again and relaxes back into nothing, into the quiet, empty sea inside his mind. Sam floats. 

He'll just rest a little longer. A minute longer, and when Sam re-emerges, the world will be back to normal again. He'll see Dean again, just as he should be. Sam's heart beats, and beats, and beats.

He just needs another minute.

.


End file.
